Blackmagic Design pushed DaVinci Resolve 21.0.4 on 5 August. It isn’t a new version and there are no headline features: it’s maintenance. But two or three lines in that changelog genuinely change how a day goes, and since post-production complaints usually land on the rental house that handed over the camera, they’re worth reading.

What’s in it

  • Support for additional X-OCN formats — in practice, files from the newly released Sony FX5.
  • Proxy relinking across different formats: the proxy used to have to match, now it doesn’t.
  • DRT imports automatically relink to nested timelines already in the project.
  • Selected clips stay visible while you adjust filters on the Color page.
  • Scripting API to read the timeline selection and reach timelines in the media pool, plus more render setting options.
  • Steadier realtime playback on heavily cached timelines, support for Affinity legacy files, and fixes to DPX decoding, CR2 stills, retime curves and media pool navigation.

The update is free for anyone already on Resolve 21, both the free version and Studio.

X-OCN is the line that matters

Every new camera body opens the same awkward window: the footage exists, the editor can’t open it. X-OCN hits that wall every time, because it’s Sony’s proprietary compressed raw — until the software reads it, your only option is transcoding everything, which costs time, disk space and one more generation where something can go wrong.

For us this isn’t theory: the Sony BURANO shoots X-OCN, and the format is the reason people book it, not a footnote. When a client asks whether their edit suite can handle it, the answer is now simpler: update Resolve and you’re fine. In our view that’s the real value of a release like this, far more than the changelog itself.

Cross-format proxy relinking

This one comes second only because it makes less noise. Anyone working across two locations — shooting in Abruzzo, cutting in Rome or Milan — generates lightweight proxies and swaps the masters back in at the end. Until yesterday, if those proxies had been made with a different codec than expected, the relink simply failed and you started over. Resolve now accepts the mismatch. On the ground that’s the difference between half an hour and a wasted afternoon.

Same story for playback on heavily cached timelines: if you’ve ever cut a ninety-minute documentary with render cache everywhere, you know exactly what we mean.

How we handle it

One rule we repeat at pickup: update before the job, never in the middle of it. A .0.4 is a small release by definition, but if the project is open and delivery is Friday, Thursday night is not when you want to discover new behaviour. Install it, open a copy of the project, check that third-party plugins still respond, then move the real one over.

Second: make sure the edit machine can handle the format before you book the camera, not after. Compressed raw costs you on set and costs you again in post, and those two decisions belong together. If the post budget isn’t there, a Sony FX6 in XAVC often closes the project with no drama, instead of chasing raw on principle. If you do want raw with a native Blackmagic workflow, the URSA Cine 12K plus Resolve is the shortest chain available today.

Final piece of advice, obvious and yet nobody does it: run a two-minute test with the codec you’ll actually use, card to timeline, before the shoot day. We can hand you a test file along with the camera. All our bodies and ready-made kits are in the catalogue.

The update and release notes are on the Blackmagic Design support site; the full list of changes is also summarised by CineD.